How To Run YouTube Ads In Front Of Your Competitors’ Videos

Have you ever wondered how you ran run YouTube ads in front of your competitors videos. We have created a simple guide to show you exactly how to set up a campaign. This is a great ways to capture views, traffic, and sales from your competitors.

Whenever I give a presentation, I will usually show people how they can capture views, leads, and traffic from their competitors videos. The audience loves to learn this simple technique so I am going to teach you how to create a YouTube campaign targeting your competitor’s videos.

Let’s get started With Our YouTube Ad Campaign___________________

In order for you to set up a campaign you are going to need the following:

A video with a great headline, story and call to action.

Adwords account

YouTube channel

If you do not have the 3 things above, it’s going to be hard for you to run YouTube ads. If you need help or have questions on how to create the perfect video, Ydraw is the best solution.

We also have other tutorials where you can learn how to set up your YouTube channel. Just click here.

Campaign Settings

Setting up your Adwords campaign

Adwords is the platform we will be using to create your YouTube ads. You are going to want to create a new campaign.

Click on the Run Campaign button and scroll down to video. I like to name my new campaign “Competitors.” You can name it what you would like.

Leave the type to standard and change the video ad formats to “In-stream or video discovery” not bumper ads.

The average cost per view will be between 8 and 15 cents. Just depends on how aggressive you would like to be. We are going to set our budget to $10 per day. That will give us around 100 views.

The cool thing about YouTube video ads is they do not count a view until they have watched 30 seconds. If they skip the ad, you are not charged. Basically, you can get free branding if they skip the video.

Moving on…

Your Networks is going to be YouTube Videos. I do not like to use video partners. A good practice is to restrict Google as much as possible. They will blow your budget if you let them.

Pick your locations and language.

When you get to the Devices section you will want to decrease the spend on Mobile. You will see a blue link for “Advanced mobile and table options.” Click on it and decrease the mobile bid.

Why do you want to do this?

I have found that results are exponentially higher when you decrease the mobile bid. If you have a large budget or you are not hitting your daily spend, feel free to change it around.

Leave the rest of the settings and click save and continue.

Ad Group Settings

Setting up you Ad groups

Ad group name and format

Next we are going to set up your Ad Group. Give it a name and then pick the video you would like to use. This is why you need a YouTube channel with a nice video.

You can jump over to your YouTube channel and grab the URL of the video you would like to place in front of your competitors.

In-stream

We will be running In-stream ads so select in-stream and put in your Display URL and your Final URL. Leave the Companion Banner as is.

Bidding

I am going to leave the bidding up to you. For now I just put $0.06, but sometimes I will bid extremely high to make sure I show up.

Targeting

With targeting, you have 6 different options and combinations. Since we’re going to be running our ads in front of our competitors videos, we’re going to want to choose the “Placements.”

I personally like to adjust the demographics to match my target audience. You can exclude certain demographics or exclude certain demographics.

Targeting (Placements)

This is the part you have been waiting for. Click on placements and then click on the “Search for placements.” I used to add everything manually, but YouTube has become better at giving us all the placements.

A lot of the placements do not allow ads on their videos. You can tell by clicking on the video and see if a 30 second ad pops up or look for the little yellow line on the bar. Here’s a simple screen shot.

So just because you see them pop up when you are searching for placements, does not mean you are going to be able to run ad in front of their videos. This is where manually searching comes into place.

The key is to find your competitors videos that are allowing ads. If you just want to search manually, you can.

This is not a 2 minute task. You will want to take some time and find as many videos as possible.

When you are done, click save ad group.

Conclusion

You’re ready to roll

I hope this simple guide helped. It’s important that you keep an eye on your campaign for a couple of days. Once you start seeing results you can tweak the account accordingly.

If you are like us, you should get some extremely cheap leads, customers, and sales from running your YouTube videos in front of you competitors.